The Contemporary Genesis (part II)

Indeed,
one is in oneself a multitude. One is the center of a whirlwind of scattered
forces, ignorant of one another, and the testimony to which must be sought in
social phenomena. When the artist wishes to compose, it is certain that his
desire responds to those general desires which were formerly called religious
or metaphysical, and of which, most of the time, he is ignorant himself, because
they do not interest him. Composition, the subordination of all the parts of a
work of art to some idea of rhythm and order, is not an external thing,
dependent on an individual caprice or a passing fashion for its rejection or
adoption. The mystic sentiment of a work to be undertaken in common goes beyond
the individual. And painting, the most individual, and the most intellectual of
the arts, either remains uncertain on all its frontiers, or else concentrates
itself in some anonymous and summary form in which the archaic outline of an
unknown architecture appears. The love of an ancient order, classical or
religious, is only the most puerile manifestation of this universal need. It is
the rôle and the destiny of the most innocent of men—he who labors or he who
thinks—to gratify this need.

Thus,
while Courbet 's and Manet's materialism of form was, through the
Impressionists and the Neo-Impressionists, approaching the end of its
investigation, while the moral cm-rent born of its pitiless decisions was introducing
acid and vitriol into painting, through Degas, through Toulouse-Lautrec, and
through the ferocious Forain, at the heart of the movement itself, an unknown
force was organizing itself and attempting, through Cézanne, to give
architecture to the universe, outside of all sentimentalism, and, through
Renoir, to recreate a sentiment indifferent to moral purposes, by seeking, in
the play of the reflections and of the lines revealed by matter itself, a
harmony without object.

For let
us make no mistake. There are no works more distant from each other in aspect,
or nearer in essence and in direction, than the one created by that man of the
will, bringing nature to obey the systems he built up in order to react against
the disorder of the time, and that of the man of instinct, finding in nature,
without apparent effort, forms which wed each other, and colors which penetrate
each other, in order to react against the despair of the time. Anarchy is
pessimistic, and what is more, sad. Those who have traversed its hell find no
repose save in the power to create order and health for themselves, or else in
death.

The
powerful man, in order to recover joy, has no need to flee the cities, and to
go, with Gauguin, to live among the primitives of to-day—as the pre-Raphaelites,
victims of the same sickness, lived among the primitives of former times—and to
build up, in distant islands, the burning landscapes whose tense and confused
sensuality does not dissimulate either their slightness or their softness, and
which halt at the façade of the Cézannian edifices. He does not permit himself
to be vanquished before his hour, in the manner of van Gogh, the Hollander, a
great heart burned by the flaming earth, he paints, by his electric waters, by
his trees and grasses crackling like tongues of fire, his roads, his houses,
his harvests, his figures, and all the faces of man, convulsed, warped, and
battered as if they were expressing some conflagration, subterranean or of
sentiment, with this painting of precious stones and of yellow gold, these
drawings whose swarming life overpowers one, this rain of gnawing acids in
which the soul and the senses are corroded, and this desire for wild joy, of an
apostate ascetic. The powerful man is not mad. And he is simple. He hums a tune
while he paints, and is bored when he is not painting. It is certain that he
suffers, in his heart, like anyone in misfortune; and his bones are twisted
with pain. But he never complains. He says he is only too happy to have kept
the sight of his eyes, those miraculous eyes, mirrors of the world, gray and
gentle and sad, sometimes sparkling with the mischief of the young painter, in
his withered face, bent, lengthened by his white beard, and so noble—recalling
that of Titian when he was almost a hundred years old. "It is he," he
says, "who looks like me. He has stolen my tricks from me." He does
suffer, as a matter of fact. But in his nature dwells the mysterious joy which
he recovers instantly at the depths of his wasted organs and his twisted
joints, the moment that he seizes his brush; and it is immense, pure, full of
movement, undulating, and renewing itself from the depths, like the source of a
great river, overflowing with sinuous forms and with waves of changing tones,
which penetrate one another, obedient to the fecund rhythms of a sensualism
grown more rich, more moving, and more complex in the measure that sickness and
age dry him up and weaken him a little more. How long ago it is—the time when,
a little astonished, a little respectful, and a little inclined to jest, he
listened to the passionate demonstrations of Pissarro, and, standing beside
Claude Monet on the banks of the Seine or of the Marne, watched the mottling of
the water and the mottling of the leaves under the wind, the round spots of the
sun on flesh and on the earth, and the vibration of the air in the silence of
the summer! In those days he had muscular hands, which caressed the surface of
the world. Now with his feeble hands he twists the world in depth.

The
history of Renoir—born at Limoges, the country of masons, potters, and
enamelers—is even of less importance than that of Cézanne, for he does not seem
to have struggled to discover his innocence. He had perhaps nothing factitious,
or almost nothing, to eliminate. He did not continually prune off, like
Cézanne, but rather added constantly. He belonged, like Cézanne, to the
Impressionist group and shared its unpopularity; later on its success. He
continued, like Cézanne, to receive the collective hatred or admiration vowed
to those who composed it, by a public enamored of classifications as definitive
as they were unprecise. For the public he must, again like Cézanne, still
belong to the group, although both of them departed from it to such a point
that one and the other may pass as the prophets of the movement in the opposite
direction which has followed it. It was, indeed, by watching the reflections on
the bark of the poplars and the oaks, on the rippling banks of clouds, on the
skin of his nude women, and on the full-blown petals of the anemones and the
roses, by pursuing them in the flight of the planes, and the sinking of the
luminous shadows, that he turned around the forms with those reflections and
those shadows, and bound up the mass of the universe with the lyrical movement
of his mind. He necessarily underwent the evolving influence of the greatest
among the greatest painters, Masaccio, Titian, Tintoretto, Velasquez,
Rembrandt, Watteau, and Delacroix; and, starting out from Claude Monet, he
rejoins Rubens by crossing the world of the flesh with its movement and its
sensations, and he will subject it to his increasing strength, and constrain it
to burst forth again from him with the regularity, the simplicity, and the
constancy of the harvests issuing from the soil. Whereas Claude Monet started
out from the immediate form realized by Courbet and Manet, while he pursued the
moving tremors made by the light on the changing husk of the form and rendered
them more and more subtle, Renoir, taking as his point of departure that husk
itself, followed the opposite path, and swept with him the tremors of the air
and of the waters, the tremors of the blood in the blue veins, and the tremors
of the flowers under the sun and the dew, and carried them into the very
substance of the air, of the water, of the blood, and of the flowers. And
whereas Impressionism refused more and more to recompose the world in the mind
and to transpose it into painting, Renoir, whose imagination, by the way, was
almost as rudimentary as that of his friends, recomposed it and transposed it
in his very instinct, seeing life, harmony, and coherent, solid, and continuous
form born where, for other men, there is only appearance, discord, the hollow
surface, and chaos.

Imagine
a whole room hung with pictures by Renoir. It seems to stream with red, from
the fruits, the blood, and the flowers pressed against the walls. From a little
nearer, there is an Oriental confusion, like a miraculous carpet; several
studies are on the same bit of canvas—a nude woman, a little girl with a pink
or red hat, a bouquet of roses, of poppies, of pinks, of geraniums, or of sage,
and a landscape the size of one's hand with the circle of the sea and of space.
But from this red mass emerges something like those currents of sap which rise
from the center of fruits to color their skin, and infinite ashen grays in
which silver and mother-of-pearl tremble, in which the emerald, the turquoise,
the pearl, and the black diamond penetrate the opal, where the slightest
colored palpitation of the slightest touch of paint resounds gently through the
ones farthest from it by subtle waves impossible to follow with the eye. And
nearer still one sees the beach and the ocean, the trees twisting their flame,
the rivers rolling into the reflection of the sky, the ribbons, the hats, the
dresses, and the unbound hair of the women—all the dews of the earth mingled
with all the prisms of the air, converted into trunks and branches bursting
with sap, flesh swelling with blood, young breasts, round arms, firm bellies,
glistening hips, and heavy translucent waters filled with the scintillation of
the ruby.

It is a
lyric transposition, ingenuous and spontaneous, into a form which seems born
and reborn incessantly from an inexhaustible focus of the senses, a
transposition of everything in the world that has radiance and splendor, the
downy pulp of peaches, the cherries, the pomegranates, the rind of lemons and
of oranges, the roses of amber color, the blood-colored roses, and the fields
of crimson clover, of cornflowers, and of buttercups, and the mouths, and the
laughs, and the glances, and the fire of glowing stones in the ripples of the
brooks, and the sun setting over the clouds, and its iridescence around the
leaves. There really is in that spring, with its tremble of silver, a little of
the blood of those bare breasts, a little of the blood of those pinks, and
there is some of the silver of that spring in those pinks and in those bare
breasts whose red reflections it passes on to the air while taking from it some
of its fire. Those massive forms turning in transparent space define painting
itself, and the least of them expresses the glory of life and the power of
summer.

When a
painter has this ability, everything encountered by his eye is instantly
transfigured. A hand on some gauze, a necklace around a neck, or a rose set in
the hair causes us to think vaguely of a butterfly wing on the pollen of some
giant flower, of a fruit laid on some blond marble, or of some unknown gem
gleaming in the darkness. Everything is tremor, everything is a caress; the
silks are like flesh and retain their lightness, the flesh is like silk and
retains its weight. An arm emerging from satin and resting on velvet borrows
from the satin and the velvet their pearl and their purple, and in exchange
transmits to them its warmth; faces in the glowing penumbra of an opera box
continue the penumbra and illuminate it, the life of the flowers and of the
lights circulates in festival halls to mingle with glances, to wander over bare
bosoms, and to quiver upon bodices, ornaments, and ribbons. Before the earlier
Renoir, one thinks of Velasquez as he might be after the passing of three
centuries, when his soul, joined by a hundred tributaries, had borrowed more of
maturity and also more of freshness from the light mists of France.

And
before the later Renoir, one thinks of a Rubens who had descended to the Latin
sea and had become more saturated in its sunlight. Especially when this
painting, with its quality of flowers and mother-of-pearl, spontaneously
mingling the pulp of the fruits and the sap of the corollas, goes down to the
burning beaches, whence the trees seem to spring forth like subterranean
flames, and where the gulfs and the sky unite in the expanse of gold. Above the
blue and pink villas perceived through the branches of the pines and the olive
trees, and above the russet walls of the old castles on the heights, the
distant mountains arise, and their glaciers send forth fires and, between the
waves and the clouds, pile up flames of mauve from the diamonds cut from the
azure by the twilight or the morning. Then all the waters sing, the apples are
about to fall from the tree, the anemones swoon, and the resplendent orgy of
the colors, of the odors, and of the murmurs turns around the broad nude flesh
spread forth in the heat. The form of the arms and of the breasts, of the
torsos and of the legs, becomes concise and circular, like those vegetable
organisms teeming with the blood of the heavy seasons. The carnal poem is
spiritualized upon contact with an admirable love which embraces it in its
ensemble, which no longer sees a detail, an accidental, an isolated or rare
gesture, but only full masses whose inner force models the movement. It is a
summarized and heroic movement, with a voluntary and profoundly expressive use
of projections and hollows, of lengthenings, deformations, and foreshortenings
of arms and of legs. As the first evolution of Renoir calls to mind Velasquez,
and the second recalls Rubens, the third, I do not know why, makes me think of
Michael Angelo. He is quite unaware of this, he paints in absolute freedom, and
the direct sensation still passes into the crippled hand, which interprets it
ingenuously, after having tempered it in the flame of the pure mind. The
natural forms all meet and marry with curves suited to them, with volumes
swelling with the same inner forces, and with a movement discovered and created
anew by the same heart.

Those
legs and those arms undulate like that stream, this torso is round like that
tree, these breasts weigh and swell like those ripening fruits. The song of joy
shouted in the burning shadows, in the curling of the waves and the streaming
of the flowers, creates a kind of swooning silence around those women,
recumbent or seated, or at play in the living water, and their wavelike forms
continue and balance one another with an ease superior to that of Raphael and a
plenitude superior to that of Jean Goujon. It is a plenitude full of movement,
which beats to its very depths and trembles in the light, where the air, the
reflections, and the dew of perspiration marry with it in order to sculpture it
summarily. It is a plenitude in which blood quivers and milk germinates, and
where, in the cloudy faces, in the fleshy lips, and under the whole tense and
vibrant skin, animal life abounds, and all the mind evolving in it. Never,
perhaps, had the profoundest and simplest instinct for living passed from flesh
and from eyes into the soul of a great painter, to be sent back into flesh and
eyes by that soul. Those babes clinging to the heavy breasts, those vibrant
arms which support them, those little beings whose form still hesitates and who
lean over a page of writing or over a toy, those little girls with red hair
whose astonished eyes open so wide as they marvel at the world, and those young
mothers who have grown heavy, express with such intensity the peaceful majesty
and the inner, mechanical circulation of life that they seem to be on the plane
of life, merged with it, and issuing from the same hearth. A grand animality
breathes in them, in its peace and in its power. The gestures and faces of
family life, the eternal attitudes of the dance, of the toilet, of distraught
meditation, of abandon, of joy, and of repose, live innocently within them.
Carrière saw those canvases and the great, red-chalk drawings like things of
the antique awaking from a long sleep, and the profound charcoal studies in
which the childish and maternal forms are fused, and despite his too didactic
striving for spiritual transposition he never attained the expressive power of
their structural form, independent, even, of the miraculous harmonies with
which Renoir surrounds them and permeates them. Universal life inundates the
most furtive gestures of the play of maternity, of love, and of childhood in
the sun and in the grasses, and there is no metaphysical need to tell of this
life. Here is the most secret mystery of the greatest painting, a pulpy,
fruitlike substance unconfined by the living lines, its boundaries marked out
by turning masses and moving volumes, and brought, by an infinite circulation
of colored particles, into its intimate relationship with the whole of space.